8:45 PM, Wednesday November 17th 2021
Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along quite well. There are a couple things I want to call to your attention though:
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On your first page, you did a great job of laying each sausage across the one beneath it, in a manner that would result in more overall stability - and therefore a more believable pile of sausages. On the second page, specifically the two bottom forms, you've got one laid out along the length of the one beneath it, which makes it seem generally more precarious. It's obviously a minor issue, but considering the way in which the forms we place on top "grip" the underlying structure, and how solid and believable it comes off, is all of significance in the long run.
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Make sure that you're drawing through all the ellipses you freehand two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1 - even the smaller ones.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, as a whole I think you are progressing, but there are a handful of things I want to call out to help you continue to develop in the right direction. I've laid out the first two issues on this page - I've labelled the individual bits of writing with letters, but it's basically two distinct issues. The first is "A" and the rest are B through E.
Starting with A, this is something I actually called out in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, which you don't appear to have fully grasped, or at least didn't apply here as consistently as you should have. The little sections I filled in with red hatching are all flat, two dimensional shapes that are not defined as existing in the 3D space of the wolf itself. They're just shapes and marks that exist only on the flat piece of paper. I'm not going to spend too much time on this one (be sure to reread my feedback from Lesson 4, both the sections talking about not altering silhouettes and the section touching on building upon your leg structures), but the just of it is that everything you add to your construction must be a complete, enclosed 3D form. If you remove everything else, that new mass should still be fully closed off, and should still have the potential to feel as though it exists in 3D space. If part of it is open-ended however, then it's going to be completely flat from the get-go.
To that point, I should also point out that in this horse head, you quite freely cut back across the initial cranial ball, rather than respecting the fact that it is a solid, three dimensional form. Similar issues can be seen on this leopard's head as well.
Jumping into B through E, here we're touching on areas where you have constructed complete, enclosed 3D forms for your additional masses - so that's good. The issue is more that you have a tendency to include somewhat random corners to the design of your new mass's silhouette, which makes them less impactful than they could be. One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.
Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.
Along the neck (pointed to in D and E) I've redrawn your mass there such that it wraps around the shoulder mass on one side, and so it transitions more smoothly along the other (rather than using a sharp corner). Shoulder and hip masses can be really useful for providing us with some additional structure to push our mass against and make it feel more grounded. They're not always going to be really obvious in your reference images, but if you know to look for them they can be very useful - and they're always present, simply because those animals need more muscle in those areas to let them walk and run around.
For the smoother transition (instead of the corner on the left), since I don't have any defined structure I can press it against, I instead just let it swoop more smoothly from one curve to the other - an inward curve where it's hugging against the torso structure, then an outward curve as it comes back around to the shoulder. This avoids "arbitrary" complexity, and reinforces the presence of the main torso. Ultimately that's what all this is - each mass reinforces the others around it, creating a grounded, believable 'puzzle' of 3D forms.
This leads me into the next point I wanted to draw to your attention - head construction. Your approaches vary, but overall you have a strong tendency to, at least in many cases, leave your different facial components floating apart from one another. Just as with the rest of the body, the head benefits immensely from having all of these different pieces - the eye sockets, the muzzle, the forehead/brow ridge, etc. - all wedged together firmly, creating a solid puzzle structure.
Based on how you've approached your head constructions here, it seems to me that you may have missed this demo from the informal demos page. Since Drawabox is continually evolving as a resource, I often find better ways to explain certain concepts to students, and until I have the time to reintegrate them into the course material proper, they get tucked into the informal demos section, as explained here on the tiger head demo this one more or less replaces.
When applying that approach, try to do it directly - down to even the specific eye socket shape of a pentagon with a point facing downwards. This allows for the muzzle to fit in the resulting wedge between the sockets, and for the brow ridge/forehead to rest on the flat surface along the top.
In addition to this, I'd also recommend that when you actually draw your eyes, try to draw the upper and lower lids as separate additional masses, as shown here. This can help a lot when it comes to focusing more on how each lid wraps around the spherical eyeball.
Before I call this critique done, there are a couple additional things I wanted to call out:
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A quick reminder that working in sketchbooks isn't recommended, as mentioned back here. While there are no rules against it, it is definitely something that can interfere in a number of ways - not least of which by limiting how much space you have to work with (even if the page is the same, having to deal with the spine can really mess with one's brain while drawing). There's really no good reason to do anything that's going to make these exercises more difficult - every additional struggle takes resources away from your brain that could be invested into markmaking, or solving spatial problems, or even just remembering the instructions.
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I'm noticing a tendency for you to draw your rib cage way too small in some drawings, like your leopards and your horses. Remember that as explained here, the ribcage occupies half of the torso length.
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Follow the specific elements of the sausage method directly, without deviation - stick to the characteristics of simple sausages for each segment, and reinforce their joints with a simple contour curve. Then, of course, build upon those structures as needed with additional masses. These are all things you do correctly in some places, but it's inconsistent in a way that suggests that you need to be thinking about this consciously throughout your drawings.
Given the number of things I've pointed out, I do think it's in your best interest to assign some revisions (you'll find them listed below). You really aren't far off. Part of it is the somewhat disorganized interim state of the lesson (which will be fixed, as I steadily work on revising videos and lesson content starting from earlier in the course), but a lot of it is simply a matter of making sure that you're absorbing the information that is available both in the existing lesson material, and in the critiques I've provided before. Both are always dense, so processing all of the information inevitably takes time, and needs to be done repeatedly at different times, rather than all at once.
Next Steps:
Please submit an additional 4 pages of animal constructions.